"Art Now and Then" does not mean art occasionally. It means art NOW as opposed to art THEN. It means art in 2017 as compared to art many years ago...sometimes many, many, MANY years ago. It is an attempt to make that art relevant now, letting artists back then speak to us now in the hope that we may better understand them, and in so doing, better understand ourselves and the art produced today.

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Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Hopper's Contrasts

Self-portrait, 1906, Edward Hopper

In a previous posting here I referred to Edward Hopper as the liberal art
establishment's answer to Norman Rockwell. I got no disagreement. I
pointed out some surprising similarities between he two artists and needlessly
underlined their differences (as in day and night). Even though I like both
artists' work, Hopper is much harder to like. With Hopper you have to "feel" the
artist--get under his skin, so to speak. In many ways Hopper could also be
compared to Grant Wood--quiet, austere, probing, but not quite as cold and
without the dry humor. Hopper goes out of his way to be profoundly humorless.
He instead, dwells on contrasts--wordless contrasts and color
contrasts.

﻿

Automat, 1927, Edward Hopper

﻿Words are superfluous in Hopper's subject matter, indeed,
almost a sacrilege, like bubble gum in church. No words are needed to heighten
the solitude of Hopper's 1927 Automat (left), or the silent, joint solitude of his
1942 Nighthawks (below). No one ever speaks in Hopper's paintings. In his landscapes,
only the wind dares break the silence. No TVs blare in his bleak, Midwestern
hotel rooms. No passing cars, not even a car horn invades his city streets. His
figures avert our gaze, lost in thought, but never thoughtless. They are as
silent as his architecture, and as motionless. And like his architecture,
whether starkly Victorian or starkly Modern, they seem just as starkly noble in
their timeless, mundane worlds.

﻿

Nighthawks, 1942, Edward Hopper

﻿Balancing the contrasts of his subjects
is his color contrasts. His is a world of sunlight seen through dilated
pupils--pure, unadulterated whites blatantly smashed against deep, colorless
blacks. But in between is a walloping palette of fire engine reds, strident
yellows, rusty browns, and patriotic blues sufficient to make even Claude Monet
rub his eyes in amazement. And there is the greatest contrast of all. Despite
the almost photographic realism, Hopper colors like an Impressionist. In peering
at his colors, between the sometimes excruciating high contrasts, one finds a
quiet, wealth of breathtakingly subtle transitions--an intermingling of his
daunting primaries into an endless array secondaries too rich to merit such a
term. Hopper's paintings, unlike Rockwell's, demand respect, not love.

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